Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light is the first Indian film in competition at the Cannes Fest in 30 years.
A graduate of the Film and TV Institute of India (FTII), Kapadia’s “Afternoon Clouds” was a 2017 Cannes Cinefondation selection.
She won the festival’s Golden Eye award in 2021 for her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing.
Motivation to tell this particular story?
I was interested in women who come to different place to work, and be financially independent. I had seen growing up in a family of a lot of women, and also the ideas that we have, that financial freedom can in some way, give us some kind of autonomy, in India it’s more complicated than that. Which is something that I wanted to explore in the film, that when does one truly have that autonomy for our personal desires and choices.
Mumbai is a city which has a lot of contradictions. Because it is slightly easier for women in our country to come to work. But it’s also an expensive city. And it’s a difficult city to live in, to commute every day. I wanted to have all these contradictions. And in a space like Mumbai, which is extremely capitalistic – one of the stories in the film is about a woman who’s losing her house. And it’s the gentrification of the Lower Parel and Dadar areas that I’ve seen my whole life. It’s a very important part of Mumbai, a history that we need to remember.
Film of two halves, moving from the big city to beach town
We see a lot of women working, but women at leisure is something that I wanted to explore, which is how the second half is positioned. But slowly the space and the sense of time starts to change. And the second half leaves the reality of the first and takes on a completely fairy tale form is what I hope for, like a contemporary fable.
Wish to convey through the film?
I think the film is about friendship, really. And it’s about being supportive of each other. In friendship amongst women, sometimes what comes in the middle of it is patriarchal values. And it spoils friendships in some way. So my hope is that to have solidarity and friendship, that is free from these things that bind them.
Film is in Kerala’s Malayalam language
First from India in competition at Cannes in 30 years
I do not. I think that people should look at things in context. I’m really happy to be selected. But there are various reasons why films get selected to competitions because there are factors in programming that people think about. I just think it’s sad that we didn’t have more films from India, because we make wonderful films. I hope that from now on, there’ll be many more films in competition from India. And it won’t take a 30-year gap to have one.
Funding from France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the U.S. and the U.K.?
It’s because there is a lack of a larger system in place in India, where there is no single body that can help you with financing your film. The NFDC [National Film Development Corporation], and Films Division before that, used to give finances to smaller films. We don’t have that any more except in states like Kerala. Also, there are a lot of people in our country and not that many funding opportunities.
In France they have great system for supporting independent firms by taxing everything that’s released in their country. I always think that in India, if small tax was put on ticket sales of all films and that money was put into a fund, which supported independent films, wouldn’t that be lovely?
